Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

“Herr Imroth,” I said quietly, “whether you understand me or no is the smallest concern to me. Why I came to Santa Maria, you will know in due season. Meanwhile, I have a little information for your ear and for your ear alone. There is in Paris, Rue Gloire de Marie, number twenty, a young woman of the name of⁠——”

I paused, for the light, shining anew, showed me upon the old man’s face something I would have paid half my fortune to see there. Fear, and not fear alone: dread, and yet something more than dread:—human love, inhuman passion, the evil spirit of all malice, all desire, all hate. How these emotions fired those limpid eyes, drew down the mouth in passion, set the feeble limbs trembling. And the cry that escaped his lips—the shriek of terror almost, how it resounded in the silence of the night!—the cry of a wolf mourning a cub, of a jackal robbed of a prey. Never have my ears heard such sounds or my soul revolted before such temper.

“Devil,” he cried. “Devil of hell, what have you to do with her?”

I clutched his arm and drew him down toward me:

“Life for a life. Shall she know the truth of this old man’s story, the old man who goes to her as a husband clad in benevolence and well-doing? Shall she know the truth, or shall my friends in Paris keep silence? Answer, old man, or, by God, they shall tell it to her to-morrow.”

He did not utter a single word. Passion or fear had mastered him utterly and robbed him both of speech and action. And herein the danger lay; for no sooner had I spoken than the light of a lantern shone full upon my face, while deep down as it were in the very bowels of the earth, an alarm bell was ringing.

The unknown were coming up out of the pit. And the man who could have saved me from them had been struck dumb as though by a judgment of God!

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Dr. Fabos is Made a Prisoner.

The Jew seemed unable to utter a sound, but the men who came up out of the cave made the night resound with their horrid cries.

What happened to me in that instant of fierce turmoil, of loud alarm, and a coward’s frenzy, I have no clear recollection whatever. It may have been that one of the men struck me, and that I fell—more possibly they dragged me down headlong into the pit, and the press of them alone saved me from serious hurt. The truth of it is immaterial. There I was presently, with a hundred of them about me—men of all nations, their limbs dripping with sweat, their eyes ablaze with desire of my life, their purpose to kill me as unmistakable as the means whereby they would have contrived it.

It has been my endeavour in this narrative to avoid as far as may be those confessions of purely personal emotions which are incidental to all human endeavour. My own hopes and fears and disappointments are of small concern to the world, nor would I trespass upon the patience of others with their recital. If I break through this resolution at this moment, it is because I would avoid the accusation of a vaunted superiority above my fellows in those attributes of courage which mankind never fails to admire. The men dragged me down into the pit, I say and were greedy in their desire to kill me. The nature of the death they would have inflicted upon me had already been made clear by the words the Jew had spoken. The pain of fire in any shape has always been my supreme dread, and when the dazzling white light shone upon me from the unspeakable furnaces, and I told myself that these men would shrink from no measure which would blot out every trace of their crime in an instant, then, God knows, I suffered as I believe few have done. Vain to say that such a death must be too horrible to contemplate. The faces of the men about me belied hope. I read no message of pity upon any one of them—nothing but the desire of my life, the criminal blood-lust and the anger of discovery. And, God be my witness, had they left me my revolver, I would have shot myself where I stood.

An unnameable fear! A dread surpassing all power of expression! Such terror as might abase a man to the very dust, send him weeping like a child, or craving mercy from his bitterest enemy. This I suffered in that moment when my imagination reeled at its own thoughts, when it depicted for me the agony that a man must suffer, cast pitilessly into the bowels of a flaming furnace, and burned to ashes as coal is burned when the blast is turned upon it. Nothing under heaven or earth would I not have given the men if thereby the dread of the fire had been taken from me. I believe that I would have bartered my very soul for the salvation of the pistol or the knife.

Let this be told, and then that which follows after is the more readily understood. The men dragged me down into the pit and stood crying about me like so many ravening wolves. The Jew, forcing his way through the press, uttered strange sounds, incoherent and terrible, and seeming to say that he had already judged and condemned me. In such a sense the men interpreted him, and two of them moving the great levers which opened the furnace doors, they revealed the very heart of the monstrous fire, white as the glory of the sun, glowing as a lake of flame, a torrid, molten, unnameable fire toward which strong arms impelled me, blows thrust me, the naked bodies of the human devils impelled me. For my part, I turned upon them as a man upon the brink of the most terrible death conceivable. They had snatched my revolver from me. I had but my strong arms, my lithe shoulders, to pit against theirs; and with these I fought as a wild beast at bay. Now upon my feet, now down amongst them, striking savage blows at their upturned faces, it is no boast to say that their very numbers thwarted their purpose and delayed the issue. And, more than this, I found another ally, one neither in their calculations nor my own. This befriended me beyond all hope, served me as no human friendship could have done. For, in a word, it soon appeared that they could thrust me but a little way toward the furnace doors, and beyond that point were impotent. The heat overpowered them. Trained as they were, they could not suffer it. I saw them falling back from me one by one. I heard them vainly crying for this measure or for that. The furnace mastered them. It left me at last alone before its open doors, and, staggering to my feet, I fell headlong in a faint that death might well have terminated.

* * * * *

A cool air blowing upon my forehead gave me back my senses—I know not after what interval of time or space. Opening my eyes, I perceived that men were carrying me in a kind of palanquin through a deep passage of the rock, and that torches of pitch and flax guided them as they went. The tunnel was lofty, and its roof clean cut as though by man and not by Nature. The men themselves were clothed in long white blouses, and none of them appeared to carry arms. I addressed the nearest of them, and asked him where I was. He answered me in French, not unkindly, and with an evident desire to be the bearer of good tidings.

“We are taking you to the Valley House, monsieur—it is Herr Imroth’s order.”

“Are these the men who were with him down yonder?”

“Some of them, monsieur. Herr Imroth has spoken, and they know you. Fear nothing—they will be your friends.”

My sardonic smile could not be hidden from him. I understood that the Jew had found his tongue in time to save my life, and that this journey was a witness to the fact. At the same time, an intense weakness quite mastered my faculties, and left me in that somewhat dreamy state when every circumstance is accepted without question, and all that is done seems in perfect accord with the occasion. Indeed, I must have fallen again into a sleep of weakness almost immediately, for, when next I opened my eyes, the sun was shining into the room where I lay, and no other than General Fordibras stood by my bedside, watching me. Then I understood that this was what the Frenchman meant by the Valley House, and that here the Jew’s servants had carried me from the cave of the forges.